Generation Bubble
Anton Steinpilz
Eco-calypse Now: The Green Movement and the New Dark Age
When someone utters words like “sustainability” and “sustainable,” I hear “intended to technologically progress no further.” Think about it: An orchestra cannot at the same time sustain one chord and strike another. The one sustained chord thus signals the entirety of the musical piece, its beginning and its end. So, if someone presents you with a piece of sustainable technology, you can be certain that you grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren will be using the same kind of device in the same kind of form.
Serfin’ USA: The Taxpayer as Ignorant Ingrate
When the crisis first struck, blame aplenty made the rounds. People of means incommensurate to their ambition who got into mortgages they couldn’t afford, lenders who confronted incentives configured in such a way that truth became inconvenient, whiz-kid number crunchers whose sure-fire means of distributing (and, one supposes, dissipating) risk turned out not only to defy reality but to see itself defied by reality — the culprits are by now legion. One wonders, though, whether culpability legitimately extends to the vast number of working stiffs who just wanted to lay something by for retirement, for Junior’s education, for grand- or great-grandchildren. Oligarchs like Munger would like to convince everyone that, yes, blame falls on them, too. If Munger is right, then there’s little anyone can do but contemplate the sad fact that guilt by association has become an existential proposition worthy of Camus. To participate in today’s financialized global economy is to commit collective murder. Call it our Hi-Fi(nance) suicide.
"Recovery Summer"–time Blues: Wage Deflation and Peak Opportunity
A minimum-wage job means a job with crazy hours and crazy shifts. A minimum-wage job means your days off can come consecutively, or fall four days apart. A minimum wage job means working until 10:00 or 11:00 PM, and then having to report to work the next morning at 6:00 AM. A minimum-wage job means having a work schedule that’s never the same one week to the next, and that’s a melange or morning, day and evening shifts calibrated for maximum exhaustion. A minimum-wage job means being hired part-time but working full time hours — without, of course, the benefits conferred upon full-timers (such as they are).
Children of the Devolution: Our Era of Neoliberal Narcissists and Tech-Savvy Troglodytes
Generation Y represents the undiminished legacy of the neoliberal 1980s and ’90s, the decades of their inception. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard. They are the people for whom life is one elaborate reality-TV show. More troublingly, they’re a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: Good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn’t get away with.
The Revolution Will Not Be Amortized: Deleveraging the New Age of Populist Rage
One finds it difficult to subscribe to the notion that mere perception can drive a population to revolt, unless, of course, by “perception” Schama has in mind something like the fact that a hunger pang leads to the perception that one’s stomach is empty. Of course, in this instance the perception has an objectively real condition behind it. And so, one can’t thinking, does popular outrage. Things might be improving, to be sure, but the degree to which any of the unruly many have experienced this improvement is, it seems, a co-efficient of his or her proximity to the corridors of power in Washington D.C. or Brussels, or to the City of London, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Chase.
Appetite for Obstruction: Fattening Resistance to the Mortgage Crisis
Good ole American-style overeating might just prove the most effective mode of home-foreclosure resistance; because it’s one thing to throw someone out of his house, but to have to cut him out is another thing entirely.
Class Struggle: Corporatized Higher Education and Symbolic Power
The ideology of corporatization, which to all outward appearances has consolidated it dominion over institutions of higher learning across the nation, now sees to the apportioning of spoils to the victor and the hindmost to the devil (the devil being the common rout of humanity), while the hapless majority have been snookered into believing that critical thinking and writing are simply passé, like the talents of the blacksmith or wheelwright, which find a market only in the incredibly small domain of touristy pioneer village mock-ups. Perceived as the relic of an era in which people had little else at their disposal to beguile their leisure, academics becomes as obsolete as the dusty Commodore VIC-20 in one’s parents’ attic. Thus confronted with having to deal with the rigors and demands of a mode of inquiry that to them has no perceivable connection to the cash nexus, today’s university student reacts with impatience and hostility, itching to move on to the more practical concern of enhancing his future earning power, which, though he may not have the foggiest idea how this is acquired, to his mind certainly does not involve Avogadro’s number, the Battle of Hastings or iambic pentameter.
The Safety of Objects: Design and "Inverted Totalitarianism"
A symptomatic reading of Objectified reveals an urge for impeccable order, an incurable desire to purge from public view the irregular, the odd, the heteroclite, and even the excessively ornate or strictly utilitarian, in order to place in their stead a whole array of everyday things boasting clean lines and soothing orbicularities — a regime of Platonic functionality, in other words, vouchsafed to an auxiliary of designers equipped with the latest drafting software and laser-guided precision instruments. Objectified comes across as a fever dream of the sort which brings the sufferer visions of the world to come: namely, the dictatorship of the creative class.
You Forgot It in People: The Enduring Allure of The Tragedy of the Commons
Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” heuristic’s chief virtue is that it flatters the vanity of the elite, supplying them with grim fairy tale of the deplorable consequences of a world without them. The heuristic assigns the elite supreme socioeconomic, if indeed not metaphysical, importance. Yet Hardin or his well-heeled fans appear to overlook the irony that the TragCom scenario features an individual — the overreaching herdsman with the extra cow — in a bid to become an elite member of his herdsmen community by chasing more wealth than his peers and thereby upsetting the economic equilibrium resulting from common title. One suspects that the elite see in this overreaching herdsmen a simplified, allegorical version of themselves: individuals having given the lie to Marxian socioeconomically determined epistemology by achieving the particular gnosis of capital accumulation. Thus TragCom assembles a logic where elites are needed to protect the commons from those who would make themselves the elites. Elites save the commons from the peons by saving the commons from themselves, and in so doing save the peons from themselves.
The Uncommercial Traveler: A Review of Helen Rappaport’s Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
Upon finishing Conspirator one cannot help but feel a certain admiration for Lenin, even if his politics stand at the very antipodes of Lenin’s own. The unflagging discipline with which Lenin pursues his life in exile reminds one of the real transformative effect devotion to an idea can have, and of the undeniable aesthetic power to be felt from witnessing that transformation unfold. For Lenin, a democratic-socialist Russian state was more than simply an idle dream of bohemian dilettantes; it was an ascesis in precisely Foucault’s sense of the term.“Purity of the heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard once wrote. And the fact that Conspirator calls to mind Foucault, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s ideas more so than Marx’s attests to the fresh life Rappaport has breathed into the career of one of history’s most notorious figures.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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